What risks arise when performing non-atomic increment operations in a multi-threaded system?

When performing non-atomic increment operations in a multithreaded system, the following risks arise:

• Race condition: multiple threads read and modify the value simultaneously, leading to lost updates.
• Unpredictable behavior: the final value may be less than expected, as some increments overwrite others.
• Data integrity violation: if the operation is not protected by a transaction or synchronization, data can become inconsistent.

To avoid these problems, atomic operations or synchronization mechanisms should be used, for example:

• In a database — use the UPDATE ... SET value = value + 1 statement in a single command.
• In Java — use classes from java.util.concurrent.atomic, such as AtomicInteger.

Example of atomic increment in Java:

AtomicInteger counter = new AtomicInteger(0);
counter.incrementAndGet();